vulgarize
Americanverb (used with object)
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to make vulgar or coarse; lower; debase.
to vulgarize standards of behavior.
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to make (a technical or abstruse work) easier to understand and more widely known; popularize.
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to translate (a work) from a classical language into the vernacular.
verb
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to make commonplace or vulgar; debase
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to make (something little known or difficult to understand) widely known or popular among the public; popularize
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of vulgarize
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
In “Children of Light,” his Hollywood novel, he wrote: “There are people at this table who could vulgarize pure light.”
From New York Times ● Mar. 9, 2020
James Ellroy served as one of two grand masters for the awards, saying, "We are here to vulgarize literature."
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 30, 2015
The waves of vulgarity this picture gave off made me have the strong instinct that he was going to vulgarize the office of the presidency.
From Time Magazine Archive
Solzhenitsyn's world is one of almost private Russian concern and grief, which no Westerner may lightly enter or vulgarize in glib anti-Communist terms.
From Time Magazine Archive
Nothing is excluded that is necessary to impression; nothing is admitted that could vulgarize or weaken it.
From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 37, November, 1860 by Various
Things are put a good deal more strongly in the film, although they have not vulgarized but only underscored James’ subtext.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 6, 2018
Ninotchka’s personhood is diminished, even as the composer’s work is vulgarized.
From New York Times ● Aug. 19, 2016
And, in a vulgarized form Rand would almost certainly reject, they have spread even further since her death in 1982.
From Salon ● Oct. 6, 2014
On it he croons in a talky flow about a manuscript — or is it a love letter? this song? his career? — that he fears will be vulgarized by commercial forces.
From New York Times ● Aug. 20, 2011
Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word for it that had not been vulgarized.
From A Crooked Mile by Oliver [pseud.] Onions
That last attraction might sound like a waste of space, a frivolous, vulgarizing touch.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 21, 2021
The original film was made with brazenly mercantile yet artistically sound intentions, and, despite its vulgarizing touches, it’s a crudely effective story about tradition and modernity, misogyny and resistance.
From The New Yorker ● Mar. 1, 2019
Or Davy Crockett movies for vulgarizing Tennessee history -- and sentimentalizing bears.
From Time Magazine Archive
Allen Tate dismissed Yevtushenko as "a ham actor," whose performances are a "vulgarizing of poetry."
From Time Magazine Archive
Intemperance in the use of language is as much to be censured as intemperance in anything else; like intemperance in other things, its effect is vulgarizing.
From The Verbalist A Manual Devoted to Brief Discussions of the Right and the Wrong Use of Words and to Some Other Matters of Interest to Those Who Would Speak and Write with Propriety. by Thomas Embly Osmun
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